Category: Tech news

Barely a day after Google Reader replacement Feedly began offering a paid version of its service, the company has sold out of the limited number of premium accounts it was making available. Feedly co-founders Edwin Khodabakchian and Cyril Moutran, say they had introduced 5,000 Pro accounts over the weekend in order to test an early version of the company’s premium product, which introduces secure browsing, Evernote integration, priority customer service, and most importantly, search.

Article search is one of the most highly anticipated features for Feedly, which currently competes against a host of alternatives, including Digg Reader and Newsblur, all of which have seen their user number grow in the wake of the Google Reader closure.

Feedly didn’t advertise the Pro version, which Moutran describes as a “v1″ product right now. Instead, the company allowed its most engaged users to sign up ahead of a larger, more public release. However, word got out when website Engadget spotted the addition on Sunday, helping to bring attention to Feedly Pro’s debut.

“It sold out much quicker than we thought,” says Moutran, who adds that users are coming from all over the world, including Brazil, France, Spain, Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and parts of Asia. “We thought the first users would be mostly in the U.S., but we’re seeing pretty much the same conversion across all counties,” he tells us.

The founders say the reason they launched Feedly Pro to only a limited number of users is because they plan on using the money the Pro accounts bring in to buy the hardware they need to roll out Pro accounts more broadly – something that’s planned for later this September, they estimate.

Today, the service has grown to over 13 million users, and now has 30 API partners live on its Feedly Cloud platform, which is what allows other news reading products and apps to utilize Feedly’s backend for their own purposes. Popular client apps like Reeder, Newsify, Mr. Reader, Byline and others already take advantage of Cloud today, and a number of other new additions will be announced in the next few weeks.

One thing that has had some scratching their heads is how Feedly has been managing to build a service of this size and scale on its own, when so many new entrants have nearly buckled under the flood of users arriving after the Google Reader shutdown. The answer to that is that Feedly has been at this for quite some time. The company first launched back in 2008, which gives it several years’ head start on the majority of competitors. Notably, has been bootstrapped out of the founders’ own pockets to date. The lack of a revenue stream had begun to worry some, who wondered if Feedly could make it without a viable income stream. But the company had told us in April how it planned to make money: by going “freemium.”

This weekend, Feedly finally switched on its business model ($5/mo or $45/year – sadly, the discounted $99/lifetime account was a one-time only deal; future lifetime accounts will cost more.) But even though Feedly has paying users now, that doesn’t mean that it’s not considering raising funding in the future.

“The opportunity is a [building a] reading platform around intent. A lot tools have been built around casual reading over the last few years, but very few have the level of engagements that we get,” says Khodabakchian, who adds that many of Feedly’s users are professionals consuming news, doctors doing research, designers following trends, and much more.

“Our vision is to create a platform that can enable you to consume this data more effectively, not just in Feedly but in tons of different applications,” he says. There are definitely a few external investors who are interested in that, Khodabakchian notes. “We’re not excluding anything, but we’d only [raise funding] if we find someone who’s really aligned on our vision,” he says. (Unrelated side note? Feedly seems to like Ben Horowitz.)

Locu, the increasingly popular menu and price list dashboard for restaurants and local merchants, today announced that it has opened its publisher platform to any online publisher who is interested in using its data.

With its new publishing platform, third-party sites can now use the company’s data to embed its menus, price lists and other information about businesses on their sites. As Locu notes, all of this is available for free and it’s not a revenue sharing deal, so sites get to keep 100% of the revenue from the ads they serve around its data. The content also won’t feature any Locu branding.

Locu already worked with major online publishers like Yelp, OpenTable and TripAdvisor and it made an API available to developers last year. The publisher platform, however, now allows anybody to integrate the company’s data without having to touch the API directly.

“Consumers want the most complete and accurate information possible when searching for local businesses menus to price listings. Since partnering with Yelp, Foursquare, Trip Advisor, Open Table and others we have had a huge amount of interest from publishers looking to leverage our technology,” said Locu CEO Rene Reinsberg in a statement today.

Given that Locu charges businesses to use its service, giving the data to as many sites as possible is a smart move, as it will only expand its reach and just make the service even more interesting to merchants.

All of the data, of course, is hosted by Locu, so to start using it, website owners only have to add a few lines of code to their existing sites.

Going Beyond Restaurants

Locu also today announced that it has hired Mark Weiss, who previously spent five years at Trulia leading its partnerships with the real estate industry, as its new Head of Business development.

According to Weiss, Locu currently has data from more than 30,000 businesses in its database that have claimed their profile, though the company also says it has data fro “millions of businesses” in its database. While most people probably associate Locu with restaurant menus – one of the core features of its service – the company also caters to other service industries and indexes their hours of operation, address, services lists and prices, too.

About a third of new weekly sign-ups on Locu are now non-restaurants and Weiss tells me that ratio is increasing quickly. “Professional services such as law firms, personal care such as spas, and home services such as home remodeling are starting to use Locu rapidly to expand their presence online,” he noted.

A dispute between CBS and Time Warner Cable over retransmission fees for its broadcast content has spilled over onto the web, with a blackout of television programming also being extended to CBS’ online properties. In the wake of Time Warner Cable dropping the CBS and Showtime signals in most major markets, the broadcaster has decided to block access to full-episode viewing on CBS.com.

Earlier today, Time Warner Cable removed CBS and Showtime programming from cable systems in markets like New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Denver, Detroit, and Dallas-Fort Worth. That happened after months of negotiations in which the two parties were unable to reach an agreement over fees paid to transmit networks to cable subscribers.

Soon after, reports began to surface from viewers in markets like New York and Los Angeles that affected viewers weren’t able to stream full episodes on CBS’ online property, CBS.com. Instead, the website showed anti-Time Warner Cable ads in the place of full-length programming.

New wrinkle in @CBS blackout: at home with my @TWC broadband, videos on CBS.com are blocked. In their place: anti-@TWC ads.—
Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 02, 2013

A spokesperson from CBS confirmed the reports with the following statement:

If Time Warner Cable is a customer’s internet service provider, then their access to CBS full episode content via online and mobile platforms has been suspended as a result of Time Warner Cable’s decision to drop CBS and Showtime from their market. As soon as CBS is restored on Time Warner Cable systems in affected markets, that content will be accessible again.

The decision to block viewers from streaming full episodes on the web is controversial, but not unprecedented. Back in 2010, amidst a skirmish between News Corp and Cablevision over retransmission fees for Fox and other networks, Cablevision subscribers were temporarily unable to access videos on Hulu. The popular online video site was put in the unenviable position of blocking viewers at the behest of its corporate parents, but access was quickly restored after a bit of backlash.

It doesn’t appear that CBS is likely to reverse course so quickly.

Over the last several years, we’ve seen a number of these disputes flair up, and when networks and cable distributors can’t reach a deal, it means that the TV networks go dark for a few days, or sometimes weeks. And then, after some time, they come back online again, with the cable companies paying more and generally passing on the higher rates to subscribers.

But in the wake of these blackouts, cable companies frequently suggest other ways that subscribers can access that programming — for instance, through free, over-the-air digital antennas, or through ad-supported viewing online.

(updating…)

Good news for fans of the scientific method: the largest and most influential university system on the planet will be giving out its research for free. After 6-year-long fight with the for-profit academic publishing industry, the University of California Senate approved open access standards for research on all 10 campuses.

The policy is major win for those who want to see academic research made public, rather than behind the pricy paywalls of big publishers. Last year, Harvard Library penned a memo urging the university’s 2,100 faculty to boycott for-profit academic research databases and instead submit articles to lower-cost open access journals.

Universities pay millions for access to their colleague’s research, with subscriptions costs up to $40,000 for a single journal. Publishing, too, can cost many times more for more prestigious closed-access journals. Nature reports that it can cost $5,000 to publish in the biology journal, Cell Reports, but only $1,350 for the most popular open-access journal PLoS ONE. “It’s still ludicrous how much it costs to publish research,” said molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Eisen.

The open access movement has friends in high-places. Recently, in response to a WeThePeople petition, the White House pledged a whopping $100 million to promote open access and to require all federally-funded research to be free of charge.

There are issues with open access; it costs money to curate high-quality peer-review and market the research. Many academic papers take years to write, and its a risky proposition to leave it in the hands of an experimental publisher.

But, speaking as a writer who likes to include academic research in my articles, open access could not come soon enough. Media outlets get inundated with research findings, but often can’t get access to the articles to report on them critically. Open access may not be perfect, but it is the future. The more people use it, the better the journals will become. And, ultimately, there will be little need for closed access at all.

Stephanie Hua spent the last ten years pushing for educational reform, first as the CEO of the Fund for Public Schools under former Chancellor of New York’s Department of Education, Joel Klein, and Caroline Kennedy, before becoming senior advisor to David Coleman at Student Achievement Partners (SAP). But as much time as she spent as a reformer on “the inside,” when it came time for Dua’s daughter to learn how to read, she struggled to find any quality materials for parents that could help get their kids started on the right path.

With the help of former Google engineer Iris Tang, Dua created Learn With Homer, a business and reading app for the iPad of the same name, which launched on the App Store this week. The idea was to transform how kids age 3 to 6 learn how to read, but not just by creating another eBook or cute little game-ified learning app for the iPad.

Instead, Dua and Tang wanted to bring together the latest educational research, learning techniques and teaching practices to create a better learning experience for both kids and parents. And one, importantly, that is aligned with the new standards of the Common Core, so that parents have assurance that their kids will start school (or kindergarten) ahead of the curve. To do so, the app blends a whole mess of custom learning content and stories taken from fairy tales, fables, and various mythologies with some killer, custom illustrations and art to make the content more engaging for young eyeballs.

Alongside these stories, Learn with Homer includes a phonics program that aims to teach kids how words not only look, but how they sound and how they’re strung together. The motivation, Dua tells us, is to create a “comprehensive literacy program” for the iPad, where kids are not just memorizing words by sight as their parents read to them at bedtime, for example, but actually learning the sounds of the words as they go.

The iPad then offers “field trips” that aim to bring the platform’s lessons into the real world by showing pictures of a fun range of animal characters and allowing kids to hear their own voices and words imitate those characters. Parents can also make recordings of their kids during the process, measuring their progress as they move through Learn With Homer’s 30 (free to download) lessons.

Parental units can also add up to three kids per account or access free storage for up to 500 of these recordings — as well as drawings. To that end, Learn With Homer offers printable mazes and other engaging puzzles, artwork and lists of books that you can buy online to supplement your wee ones’ learning activities.

“The single biggest predictor of children’s academic success is their reading level at third grade,”
Dua tells us. “Through Learn With Homer, we want to help kids and parents in the early years, when it matters most. So every element of the experience serves a learning purpose, but also allows kids to have fun. Our parent testers were blown away by how much their children enjoyed using Learn with Homer — and even more by how much their children learned.”

It’s tough to create an engaging, gamified product experience, while prioritizing the learning experience in a way that doesn’t cheapen either side and maintains the balance. Learn With Homer does both, and the design is actually stunning. You don’t have to play with this for long before realizing how much parents are going to love this.

Learn With Homer is backed by $2.2 million in seed financing raised from a flock of venture and angel investors, including: Great Oaks Venture Capital; Paul Francis, Entrepreneur and early CFO of Priceline; Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters, Founding Partner of Angelic Ventures; Rob Soni, Entrepreneur, Investor, former Managing Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and General Partner at Matrix Ventures; and Matt Turck, Managing Director, FirstMark Capital (who invested personally).

For more, find Learn With Homer at home here.

Thank you, Y Combinator, for not just investing in a million photo-sharing apps. While you might not be personally excited about an online marketplace where you can buy and sell used manufacturing equipment – and, at launch, primarily semiconductor equipment – a new startup called Asseta demonstrates the potential in taking the now familiar concept of a transparent buyer and seller marketplace to a new vertical, which has yet to be flattened by the power of the web and the one-to-one connectivity it allows.

Like many traditional businesses which have since seen their old ways of doing things transformed in similar ways – anywhere there’s a middleman that can be eliminated, that is – Asseta, too, is taking on its own fragmented market of competitors. Today, there are hundreds of used equipment brokers employing sales people who manage the sale of these goods, often without letting buyers know where the equipment comes from, who the sellers are, and definitely not what the real, underlying price of the item is.

Asseta’s founders know how this works, of course, because three of the four worked for one of the largest brokers in the business – a company responsible for 1.6 percent of the $6 billion (as of 2010) market in used semiconductor equipment sales.

Explains CEO Anton Brevde, there was no specific event that prompted him and the other founders, including his ex-brokerage co-workers Jonathan Pease and Garrett Beck, or CTO Danial Afzal, to leave their current jobs and build Asseta. “It was just seeing how much money [our former] company was making, and how inefficiently the processes and the company was being run – it just didn’t make any sense,” says Brevde. “We realized there was a bigger opportunity here…we were all young, and understood the potential of technology. We decided we could do a better job.”

The website today is filled with items regular folks won’t know much about, but the site is also familiar in a way, with its image-heavy (almost Pinterest-like) look-and-feel, and navigation by category much like you’d find on any marketplace website or e-commerce store.

However, despite the appearance of being simply an “eBay for X,” Brevde says that there’s much more that needs to be done to make a marketplace like Asseta work for the enterprise.  eBay has so far failed to address enterprise needs, in fact, he notes, with its consumer-friendly focus. That’s why, in addition to the enabling the communication between buyer and seller, the company is now working to add other components to the site like approvals, contracts, and then finally payments. (Today, it handles these things offline instead.)

To use the site, would-be-equipment buyers can search the now 10,000 live listings from Asseta customers, which includes those from a dozen or some initial partnerships the company formed through their previous industry relationships.

Product info (e.g., make, model, year) is provided on each listing, including, most importantly, price. When a buyer is ready to purchase, they just contact the seller through the system and then Asseta gets involved to help facilitate the sale, and handle the payment, shipment and fulfillment. Commissions are usually 5 to 10 percent, lower than the standard 50 percent on average in the industry. Buyers can also sign up for notifications for equipment they want but Asseta doesn’t yet have.

Meanwhile, sellers can upload listings individually or import a spreadsheet. Asseta handles a lot of the grunt work here, including going on site and taking photographs.

Equipment on the site ranges form a few thousand dollars to several million, and, as previously noted, it’s mainly semiconductor equipment at present. But the company is now beginning to list other equipment in printed circuit board assembly, optics, LED, and solar, each of which are good-sized markets of their own.

Says Brevde, those other industries will naturally come to the site because of the overlap in technologies, and then Asseta will be able to convert them into uploading the equipment they have for sale, too. Though he declined to provide the number of transactions or exact dollar amount they’ve processed since launching the online marketplace this June (previously, they had been testing the model offline), he would say that Asseta has already completed “six figures in sales” and is profitable since the marketplace debuted. Outside of YC and YC VC funding, the company was bootstrapped.

As noted above, Y Combinator’s backing of Asseta is somewhat unusual – used manufacturing equipment is not normally an industry that the incubator goes after. Brevde admits that they were kind of “an odd one out” during the current YC class. “We’ve been working on making it easier to understand what we’re doing, because in the beginning it was a lot of blank stares,” he says.

The team decided to join YC, however, because they had never before done a startup, and Asseta is about making a major transition in an industry from one business model to another. “It felt like we were starting over from scratch,” says Brevde. “Being mentored from the people who built Yahoo mail and Gmail really helped.”

Y Combinator partner Garry Tan agrees that Asseta is in “an unusual and unsexy space,” and it also represents the first time YC has invested in anything of this sort for used equipment.

“But the team is composed of domain experts — guys who know this industry inside and out, and that’s why we funded them,” says Tan. “Software is eating every market, sexy or unsexy.”

AOL made another round of cuts today.

The news was first reported in Valleywag, which said the layoffs “won’t break any records for AOL” (which owns TechCrunch) and that the cuts include some recent hires.

A spokesperson for AOL (which owns TechCrunch) declined to comment, but a source with knowledge of the company confirmed that there were layoffs today, and that, as reported, they affected the AIM, video production, and human resources teams. (AOL reportedly laid off 40 members of AIM team last year.) Although my source did not say how many people were affected, they did note that there are other areas of AOL that are still hiring.

By the way, the company will be releasing its second quarter earnings report on Wednesday. Since the quarter ends on July 31, the report won’t cover today’s layoffs, presumably, but it should give a general sense of whether the cuts indicate broader issues or if this is, from a company perspective, a relatively minor administrative move.

San Francisco-based startup Pixelpipe, which previously offered services for uploading photos to a variety of online destinations, before moving to support a wider variety of file types under a cloud-to-cloud rebranding known as Pi.pe, shut down today. The company says it will now be “joining a much larger organization,” but the details are not yet finalized.

However, there are hints that at least some of the work Pixelpipe had accomplished won’t be all for naught, as the company’s brief but vague blog post notes that the team will be “working on similar themes to what we have delivered with both our Pixelpipe and Pi.pe services.”

Founded back in the later stages of the Web 2.0 era, Pixelpipe first launched back in fall 2008 as a personal media syndication utility that let users distribute audio files or images to a number of popular online services, including Flickr – or, to give you an idea of the timeframe – to sites like friendster, Pownce, Friendfeed, 72photos, Acrobat.com, Fotki, Buzznet, and others.

The company continued on for many years, raising $2.3 million in funding, and becoming fairly well-known – though never hugely popular – as a utility for quickly getting photos into the cloud, via desktop or mobile. Then, in April 2012, it made a slight pivot, or perhaps “expansion,” if you will, to focus on moving data between cloud services, instead of from a desktop computer or mobile phone into the cloud, as with Pixelpipe.

There are actually few ways to do this today – if, for example, you want to export your Facebook photo collection and move it to Flickr, or put all your Dropbox photos and files into Picasa (now G+ Photos) or Google Drive, for instance – it’s still hard to do after the fact. Though other tools like IFTTT have come along to automate actions that can occur at the time of upload or posting, as the case may be, managing larger libraries of cloud data is something consumers don’t really have many good tools to do. (Or maybe, don’t want to do?)

As of this May, the company’s users had transferred over 50 million files to date, up from 8 million in October 2012. Between the two services, the company had just over 1.2 million users, and the average Pi.pe user imported around 700 files and exports over 850.

Pi.pe had supported a ton of services including 500px, Amazon Glacier, Box, CX, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Flickr, Google Drive, Mixi, MySpace, Orkut, Photobucket, Picasa, Shutterfly, Smugmug, Sugarsync, Trovebox, VK, Walgreens, YouSendIt, and YouTube. It had also recently added a photo printing option, and had iOS and Android applications for Pi.pe (to replace the Pixelpipe app) in the works.

Obviously, we’re all placing wagers here on whether or not it turns out to be Yahoo who bought this one up. (We’re digging.) Phone calls and emails to Pixelpipe have not been returned.

Update, 7: 30 PM ET: Pixelpipe CEO Brett Butterfield has responded, but only to say that he cannot talk about the deal until it’s been completed. “I will however say that it’s good news,” he notes.

Now, the company says that today it’s shutting down both the Pixelpipe and Pi.pe services, and yes – it’s effective immediately.

Both sites are redirecting to the company blog post, copied below.

Service update from Team Pixelpipe

The Pixelpipe team is pleased to announce that we will all soon be joining a much larger organization. While the details are still to be finalized, we can say that we will be working on similar themes to what we have delivered with both our Pixelpipe & Pi.pe services.

We are very proud of the many millions of files that we have been able to share over the years & thank all of our loyal users.

Today we are shutting down both the Pixelpipe & Pi.pe services. We hope that you have enjoyed using our free services & will only wish us the best as we transition to our new roles. Please follow our blog for further updates, you can direct any questions or comments you may have to [email protected]

Liberate Your Media!

– Team Pixelpipe

Lunch goers in San Francisco startup neighborhoods like SOMA and the FiDi have lost one of their better food options today, as the EAT Club food bus has suspended operations after receiving a cease and desist from the city. The shutdown of its San Francisco service follows a disagreement over how to classify the EAT Club vehicle under city food codes.

EAT Club’s food bus launched in May, bringing a wide variety of quality meals to food deserts in San Francisco. The idea was to bring all of the awesome foods available from a wide variety of restaurants throughout the city, and make them available through a single mobile app. It did that by carting around food from three or four different restaurants every single day, in heaters or refrigerators designed to keep food at the perfect temperature when customers picked it up.

Since no food was actually prepared on the bus, folks at EAT Club argued that it didn’t fit under the usual codes for food trucks, and so hadn’t been licensed as such. The startup believes that it’s best classified as a “delivery vehicle” and therefore shouldn’t need a license to operate in the city.

There’s just one problem — while the EAT Club food bus carried food from a restaurant to areas where customers would purchase its goods, it didn’t rove the streets to do so. Instead, it just kind of sat in one place all day waiting for customers to place orders on its app, then come pick up food from a static location.

And, according to San Francisco’s Department of Public Works, it’s not allowed to do that.

The department issued a cease and desist to EAT Club, telling the startup that it needs a Mobile Food Facility Permit. Until EAT Club does so, the Public Works Department demands that it “cease operations in the public right-of-way.” In other words, don’t park in the street all day serving food, guys!

While EAT Club has stopped serving San Francisco from its food bus, the company will continue operating its legacy food delivery business in Silicon Valley. And it’s looking for ways to make the bus work in the city. That means continuing to meet with city officials to work out some sort of compromise, or finding other ways to actually use the bus for deliveries — like maybe taking it to various startup or corporate offices during lunchtime.

EAT Club has raised $6.5 million from investors that include August Capital, First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures, Zulily and Blue Nile co-founder Mark Vadon, and other angel investors.

To see what the EAT Club bus was about in happier times, check out this video:

==
* The FiDi is my favorite acronym in the history of lame city acronyms.

On this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Greylock’s newest partner, Josh Elman, in the studio to answer reader questions on his views on local marketplaces and more.

Elman tackled how he feels about the SoLoMo trend, and whether local networks are gaining traction at the expense of Facebook. Elman, who worked on user growth at both Twitter and Facebook, also talked about growth hacking.

Check out the video above for more!

Google today announced a number of updates to YouTube that will allow more video producers to use YouTube for live streaming. All channels in good standing with at least 100 subscribers will be able to live stream from their accounts within the next few weeks.

By bringing the number of required subscribers down to 100, Google is opening up this service to a large number of new users. Earlier this year, Google dropped changed the limit to include channels with at least 1,000 subscribers, so there is a clear trend here. It’s not clear, however, if Google will ever open up live streaming to all users on YouTube.

With today’s update, YouTube is also giving its users the ability to upload custom thumbnails for their videos. Until now, YouTube told its users to make sure that they shoot their video with thumbnails in mind, so that they can select a good one directly from the video. Starting today, users can simply upload a custom thumbnail for their shows. As Google notes, though, it will revoke the ability to upload these thumbnails from creators who don’t follow its Community Guidelines.

Another new feature in today’s update is the ability to use annotations to link externally to online stores and the user’s associated websites, which will give users new ways to monetize their shows.

Users can now also program related videos for their viewers. This allows them to create a playlist of shows for their viewers and YouTube will “show viewers of your videos the next episode from the series and a link to the whole playlist. Just mark your playlist as a “series” in the playlist settings.”

As a YouTube spokesperson told me, today’s update essentially turns everybody with a verified account on YouTube into a partner. All of these feature are (or will shortly be) available to all users, with the obvious exception of live streaming, where you do need to have at least 100 subscribers to activate it.

Travel startup WeHostels wants to make it easier for people to book affordable lodging while on the go. Over the past year it has done that, betting on mobile in a big way by releasing apps for the iPhone and Android devices. Today, it released a new version of the app just for the iPad, taking advantage of the device’s larger screen to give users more information about the places they’re looking to stay at.

The WeHostels iPad app gives users access to more than 40,000 hostels, budget hotels, and bed and breakfasts around the world. All places listed are rated by community members, and allow backpackers and other travelers to have an idea of where they’re staying before they show up to a hostel. Users can book instantly on the app, also ensuring that they’ll have a place to stay.

The app takes advantage of the iPad’s larger screen, both for displaying maps when searching for a place and for the information provided when checking out various hostels and budget hotels. Searching in a given location will allow users to see a list of options and their ratings, while also providing a map view so users know where they are.

When you choose to look at a certain place, the app displays photos, ratings, location, and general information, as well as reviews from community members who have stayed there. The app also allows travelers to book a room from the same page, closing the loop on the transaction quickly and easily.

That could lead to more bookings for WeHostels, as it attempts to gain ground in the race to provide temporary accommodations. There are more than 140 million iPads out in the wild, and yet WeHostels is one of the few travel lodging apps that have launched an app specifically for the device. That contrasts it with companies like Airbnb or Couchsurfing, which don’t have iPad apps yet.

WeHostels has raised $1.2 million in funding from investors such as Ventech, Quotidian Ventures, CAP Ventures, TA Venture, and Torrenegra Labs.

According to a report in CNET today, the FBI wants to follow the NSA into broad surveillance of Internet data by forcing large telecommunications carriers to put in place what is described in the story as “eavesdropping technology.” Once installed, the technology would grant the FBI sweeping new powers to collect metadata on the Internet activities of American citizens.

At work here are so-called ‘pen register,’ and ‘trap and trace’ orders, under the legal authority of which metadata can be collected in real-time. And in large amounts. Getting one of the orders, according to CNET, is exceptionally easy. Trap and trace authority allows for the collection of metadata – but not content – of incoming communication, according to the U.S. Code of Laws. Pen register allows for the collection of phone numbers called from a particular line. If CNET is correct, and the authority given by the pen and track orders can be used to collect Internet metadata, we are seeing law intended for telephonic information bent to vacuum up different digital information. This is misuse of law.

Thus the two points fit together: The FBI forces the telecommunications companies to install the technology that it wants to use to track metadata, and then uses the pen register or trap and trace authority to collect as it pleases.

The metadata scope of what the FBI could collect under that connection of installed tech and legal authority could, in CNET’s view, include “IP addresses, e-mail addresses, identities of Facebook correspondents, Web sites visited, and possibly Internet search terms as well.”

CNET claims that carriers are fighting the installation of the FBI’s technology. This is to be encouraged. However, it is worth noting that there is strong precedent for their cooperation, perhaps the prime example of which is the infamous NSA room at the AT&T building in San Francisco. From that location, the NSA is widely believed to have full access to the fiber optic cables through which Internet traffic flows.

The report that the FBI is working to expand what I would call real-time collection of metadata from telecommunications companies is troubling in that it underscores how intent the various arms of the United States government are in their pursuance of more and more information concerning the private lives of its citizens. At the same time, the revelation, if borne out, is not a surprise.

In this case, however, we lack a set of documents to corroborate the current allegations, so we’ll refrain from stating that the full CNET report is correct in every aspect. CNET, in its work to better the public understanding of government surveillance, has had to issue certain retractions following coverage that was in some ways misleading.

A growing question out of the NSA leaks, and now the allegation that the FBI wants to get deeper into this game is the definition of metadata, and the simple truth that your metadata might be my content. The rules that separate the two feel flimsy, and not fully formed.

Top Image Credit: Cliff

Darrell: Google recently updated its Nexus 7 tablet, with a new design and brand new specs including a more powerful processor and much better screen. The device also has the distinction of being among the first in line for new Android updates, so it’s an early-adopter’s delight. But despite all the new, the Nexus 7 doesn’t really dramatically change the tablet space; it slots in more or less where the original version did, as a tablet that’s good for the price but unlikely to provoke any passion.

Chris: Well, maybe it doesn’t for you. But for a market teeming with people who are itching to buy tablets over more traditional computers, the new Nexus 7 represents a major step forward over the original without a corresponding increase in price. I suspect that a considerable chunk of people are going to look at this thing, mull their options, and take the plunge. And, you know what? They could do a lot worse.

Darrell: If anyone gets this instead of a computer, they’re in for a rough surprise.

Darrell: The Nexus 7 has a lot going for it on paper, not least of which is the super high resolution display. The 7-inch screen has 1980×1200 resolution, making it officially the sharpest knife in the drawer, if the drawer is filled with tablets and sharpest knife here refers to sharpest screen.

That’s not all that the Nexus 7 brings to the table; its other big selling point is price. In the U.S., the 16GB version retails for $229, which is $30 more than its predecessor, but still $100 cheaper than the iPad mini with the same amount of onboard storage and wireless connectivity. So that’s double the screen resolution, for a third less money.

Chris: Yeah, that’s fine, get on with it.

Darrell: It’s also smaller and lighter than the iPad mini (and has a smaller display, too). You’d think that would give it portability/usability benefits, but oddly it doesn’t. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the Nexus 7 is larger than the iPad mini, even though objective measures prove that isn’t the case. Is it the gargantuan top and bottom bezels? The slightly thicker case? Hard to tell exactly, but ergonomically it’s just not up to scratch with the Apple tablet.

Chris: Anyone ever tell you you’re sort of a tablet snob? Sure, it’s no iPad mini, but are you shelling out iPad mini money for this thing? No, you’re not. I agree that those bezels are huge and they make the Nexus 7 feel strangely long when you hold it vertically, but I certainly wouldn’t call them dealbreakers. Holding this thing is like holding a slightly heavier Paperwhite Kindle, which is most definitely a good thing — there’s definitely some heft there but I find it more reassuring than anything. The soft touch finish on the 7′s rear is a welcome addition too, as it helps you get a better grip on things if you’re playing games or furiously swiping through one of Darrell’s many Apple patent articles.

Darrell: Pricing arguments start to feel hollow when the difference is $100, and it’s only $50 if you go with Apple Certified Refurbished products. The Nexus 7 was a pricing bomb when it first hit and the full-sized iPad starting at $399 was the alternative from Apple, but no one’s going hungry over the difference now, so you can stop with the cries of class bias.

Darrell: It feels cheaper, too, but that’s because it is cheaper. And it doesn’t feel as cheap as some other third-party Android tablets I’ve held, so the build quality is actually a net plus for the new Nexus 7. Also top and bottom speakers make for better sound orientation when watching movies, but they don’t beat the sound quality on the iPad mini’s two bottom-edge stereo speakers.

Chris: I’ve got to give it you on that one. The stereo speakers that Asus loaded this thing up with produce reasonably loud, crisp sound, but they do fall flat when compared to the sort of sound that the iPad mini’s downward-facing pair can pump out. That’s honestly quite a shame considering that 7-inch 1920×1200 display is pretty great for taking in a mobile movie or two.

Darrell: This Nexus 7 comes with Android 4.3 (though you might need to update out of the box to get it up to speed), which brings a few new features for users including restricted access for multiple user profiles! Exciting! … sort of. If you have lots of mischievous children who share your device. Or if you want to keep your tablet porn habit hidden from your loved ones. It’s a nice addition, but Google certainly is not going to sell any tablets on the strength of Android 4.3 alone, unless dev shops are looking for new testing devices to cover their bases.

We’re not going to talk about cameras because if you’re buying a tablet based on its picture- or video-taking abilities you’re doing it wrong.

Chris: I’ll expound a bit since Darrell’s being sort of a grump — neither the 5-megapixel camera nor its 2-megapixel front-facing brother managed to produce anything worth writing home about. They’ll certainly do in a pinch if you’ve got absolutely nothing else on hand that could do the job, but you’ll definitely want to whip out your phone instead when the urge to snap selfies becomes too much to resist.

Darrell: Don’t listen to Chris: If it’s a choice between taking a pic with your tablet and missing the moment, you’ll always have your memories.

As for the other aspects of the Nexus 7′s performance, it’s absolutely fine in most cases, with some slowdown in Chrome when scrolling that’s a little disconcerting. Overall, nothing to write home about, but no problems that would annoy the average user to the point of making them want to return the device, either. Adequate, in other words.

Chris: Some people maybe nonplussed by the Nexus 7′s spec sheet since it isn’t loaded up with the absolute latest and greatest chipsets, but its 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro and 2GB of RAM kept things chugging along with a minimum of headaches. I’m not much of a mobile gamer, but I didn’t notice any lag or performance issues while putzing around in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City or losing at Riptide GP. And loading up and playing several high-definition films (that I, uh, own) didn’t present many issues for the 7 either. There was the occasional visual stutter, but that’s at least partially because most of the video player apps I use haven’t been optimized for Android 4.3 yet.

And there’s the battery, which has actually shrunk a bit since the last Nexus 7. I’ve been able browse web pages, fire up non-graphics intensive apps, answer emails, and basically mess around for about a day and a half before having to recharge. Loading up those videos definitely takes a toll on things though (especially if you’ve got that screen brightness cranked up) — I generally managed to get between six and seven hours of non-stop video going before everything went dark.

Darrell: The Nexus 7 is good for a few, very specific things: it makes an excellent e-reader; if you like digital comics they look amazing on this screen; and if you’re into acts of piracy such as torrenting it’s much easier to accomplish on Android than on iOS without getting a proper computer involved. But ultimately the Nexus 7’s screen isn’t enough to lure me away from the iPad mini permanently; if anything, it has only whetted my appetite for a Retina iPad mini, which indications suggest we’ll probably see before the end of the year.

Chris: I’d characterize it a little differently — the new Nexus 7 is a great generalist tablet. It’s reasonably handsome (those bezels aside), it can hold its own when it comes to pure horsepower, and that price tag can be awfully hard to resist. Is it a perfect tablet? Obviously not, but it’s definitely a worthy purchase for first-time tablet owners or people who want a hardy companion to throw in a bag every day.

Gillmor Gang – Bret Taylor, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session today has concluded. Find us on facebook at Facebook.com/gillmorgang